


Some Historical Excerpts Concerning the Life of Alfred Plugg, Muggle, Functioning Also as a Cautionary Tale on the Potentially Disastrous Effects of Cavalier Memory Modification

by EfremPangui



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Basilisk(s), Gen, Muggle Studies, One Shot, Pre-Canon, Questionable Plumbing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2018-04-28
Packaged: 2019-04-29 03:19:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14463864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EfremPangui/pseuds/EfremPangui
Summary: Noted magical historian Henry Clark explains why Hogwarts castle apparently has muggle plumbing in it, and why that plumbing has snakes in it, while dealing with the frustrations of an academic lifestyle in the wizarding world.





	Some Historical Excerpts Concerning the Life of Alfred Plugg, Muggle, Functioning Also as a Cautionary Tale on the Potentially Disastrous Effects of Cavalier Memory Modification

By Arthur Weasley and Professor Cuthbert Binns (with truly brutal editing by Henry Clark, Historical College of Aberdeen)  
  
Introduction:  
  
Well, it is sort of by them. In a manner of speaking. They certainly wrote a book by that title. Unfortunately, the two of them wrote a book about the size of Guzlewick’s Snafwoofle Ping(1) and as exciting as the life of a flobberworm farmer. Arthur tried to give a complete history of plumbing (mostly very, very wrong), while Professor Binns (who had already been dead about a hundred years by the time this story commences) tried to give relevant historo-cultural background information, most of which was apparently drawn from a flapper party he once attended (while dead) in Manhattan. I eventually had my grad student go through and pull out everything she thought was important. I have summarized it here. Professor Binns is unlikely to notice the changes, owing to his inability to open a book, or keep his reading glasses on, and I’ve managed to convince Arthur that it would be more fun to read the work in e-book format, so I don’t think I will have to worry about him noticing any time soon, either. He has already set fire to his first e-book reader, owing to some unfortunate confusion about the name of the thing. Molly will have killed me long before Arthur ever notices anything amiss.  
  
In any case, let us begin with me giving relevant historical context. It is a common misconception that, since anti-muggle feeling is now commonest in the most conservative elements of magical society, it must have been still more common the farther back in time one goes. This is, of course, balderdash. In ancient times there was near-continual interaction between the two groups, and even in the Middle Ages and most of the Modern period, we see, for all the prejudice, a good deal of communication between the two groups. Consider Merlin. Consider Francis Bacon. Consider Tesla (2).  
  
While pure-blood feeling has always been present among more radical elements, its prominence in recent history is largely a backlash against the fad in the twenties and early thirties among certain young witches and wizards for great cultural involvement with muggles. The muggle invention of the wireless was adopted, as were the car, and the bowler hat (still so popular in our ministry). Muggle culture was everywhere, reaching even to the isolated office of my colleague, Professor Binns (3). Every major wizarding school established Muggle studies departments in the twenties (4), and most major governments were forced to establish departments to deal with the misuse of muggle artifacts. Muggle culture was a rampant fad, and in no place is this more notable than in toilets.  
  
The wizarding world (5) has long had its own ways of disposing liquid and solid waste, with systems ranging from outhouses, to specially modified vanishing cupboards (6). None of these measures matched the sheer mechanical ingenuity of the muggle flushing toilet. Unfortunately, getting a muggle toilet to work in a wizard dwelling tended to pose fairly severe technical difficulties. Plumbing had been part of the magical community since they first talked the Romans into setting up some aqueducts, but mostly they were fairly slip-shod, with lead pipes held together by sticking charms, following illogical round-about routes to indeterminate destinations. Managing to modernize these odd drainage and water-delivery into something resembling modern plumbing required an unusual degree of skill.  
  
Alfred Plugg, of west London, was first hired by an Isidore Trellis of Holyhead, Whales. Mrs. Trellis had a primitive drainage system and a penchant for bloody noses, with the result that her drainage pipe had become, unbeknownst to her, the breading ground for a colony of redcaps. Alfred Plug, while trying to install a septic tank, was attacked by twelve of them. Having had experience during the First World War (more commonly, and optimistically, known as the Last Goblin Rebellion), Alfred Plug succeeded in bludgeoning ten to death with his shovel and heaving the remaining two into the Irish sea. He then finished installing the septic system and hot and cold running water, before informing Mrs. Trellis, who promptly paid him 50 Galleons (about 15,234 guineas (7)), modified his memory, and informed all her friends. Alfred Plugg soon had a thriving business, with only the minor difficulty that he could remember almost none of it.  
  
However, the powers of memory charms are not limitless. Even an excellent charm is quite unlikely to be able to remove subconscious effects of memories, (8) and eventually, it is possible to develop partial immunity. Alfred Plugg, while never consciously realizing what was happening, seems subconsciously to have retained a large part of his experience. In February of 1924, Hilary Crumpet wrote in her diary that she had to rescue the muggle plumber from a boggart that jumped out at him when he was trying to replace a section of stink-pipe. In October of the following year, Edward Fleming reports having been rescued by Plugg. A boggart had jumped Fleming while he looking for a plumbing diagram he had stowed in the back of a cupboard. Plugg then tackled the boggart (in the shape of a Banshee) and forced it into a Father Christmas suit which Fleming had also been storing in the cupboard, bypassing the need for the Ridikulus charm. (9)  
  
Such stories as these may go a long way to explaining the relative respect shown Plugg, while his residual experience even after several hundred memory modifications, along with his generally stoic character, help explain his calm and surprising competence in dealing with various things he was not supposed to know existed.  
…  
  
Alfred Plugg was having breakfast with his wife, Penelope, when he told her that a gentleman has approached him the other day in a pub, and hired him to do a spot of plumbing in Scotland, and that he would have to be gone for several days. Plugg did not explain why he was being hired to do a job several hundred miles away, nor did he mention that the job offer had been given him by a man wearing a kilt, high-healed shoes, an orange tuxedo top and a coon-skin cap. These things had not struck him as unusual at the time, and so he saw no reason to raise the subject.  
  
Penelope did not press her husband on the point. She had grown used to such odd jobs. She had, for a while, suspected that he was carrying out an illicit affair, but had been dissuaded from this point of view by the look of grim resignation that always accompanied her husband’s descriptions of these forthcoming jobs. She had finally reached the conclusion that her husband had joined the secret service, and had sworn an oath of secrecy, which prevented him in confiding the details of his extremely dangerous missions to his dear wife, causing him much internal suffering. She therefore responded to Alfred’s nebulous description by giving him another piece of toast with marmalade, patting him on the arm and saying “There, there, dear. Do be safe,” while rehearsing the description of his haggard countenance that she would give (in strictest confidence, of course) to her friend Dorothy Hensworth.  
  
Alfred Plugg duly set off north, stopping the night in London, and then taking the train for Edinburgh, where he transferred to a rickety local engine, which passed shuddering into that wild countryside characteristic still of the most desert parts of the Scottish highlands.  
  
What few passengers had boarded the train began to depart onto various ill-repaired stations, until the only other man on the train was a thinnish, balding man with a neat beard, wearing an orange robe. “Probably one of those Jesuits,” (10) Plugg thought, but without entirely knowing why, he found himself wishing he still had the luggage he had given to the porter, with its comfortingly large supply of extremely heavy spanners.  
  
The man was regarding Plugg with some interest. “I say,” he said, “you wouldn’t be Mr. Alfred Plugg, would you?”  
  
“Yes, I am,” said Plugg, mildly surprised for the first time.  
  
“Oh, excellent. I’m Professor Jenkins. Professor of Muggle studies, at Hogwarts, you know.”  
  
“Oh yes, sir? I’m off to do a job there just now, as a matter of fact.” It paid to be polite. Anyway, Plugg had been told that many Papists were quite nice people, really. It was best to keep an open mind.  
  
“Yes, I know. The headmaster asked if I might be able to find you on the train. The place is rather easy to miss.”  
  
“Oh. Thank you, sir.”  
  
The two sat in silence for several minutes until Jenkins abruptly stood. “Here it is,” he said, and began walking to the door at the end of the car. Plugg stood and followed. Jenkins put his hand to the door, and seemed about to open it. “Sir,” said Plugg “the train doesn’t seem to have stopped yet.”  
  
“That’s true,” Jenkins replied, conversationally. He wrenched the door open, took Plugg’s arm, and stepped lightly off the moving train.  
  
They landed, much more gently then Plugg would have anticipated, on a platform which he had somehow failed to notice from the train. The porter had evidently thrown Plugg’s luggage after him, and with a good deal of precision, for he found it in a neat stack next to him.  
…  
  
Alfred Plugg found himself in one of the twenty-seven rooms which were to become bathrooms. He was horrified. There were already a few faucets rigged to pump-handles, with draining basins fixed beneath them. In theory, this was an excellent start. The difficulty arose, however, when one examined the horrifying tangle of pipes beneath where the floor had been taken away. There ought, in theory, to have been a single water supply pipe, and a single drainage pipe, with branches to the faucets and basins. In fact, each seemed to have its own pipe, with an additional thirty or so pipes, evidently meant to keep the others company. The pipes were of a bewildering mixture of lead, copper, bronze, cast iron, ceramic, and a sort of scaly leather, this last apparently holding hot water, though how this was possible, given as James Patton firmly denied that the castle had a boiler room (though he expressed great interest in the concept), Alfred Plugg could not say.  
  
James Patton, a boy of about seventeen, had been introduced to Plugg by Jenkins. He seemed young, clever, enthusiastic, and slightly insane. Jenkins had explained that James would be assisting him. How, exactly, was not made plain. His net contribution so far, as far as Plugg could tell, had consisted of un-sticking Plugg’s fountain pen, which had done this rapping it sharply with a conductor’s baton, while muttering incoherently. Plugg was inclined to doubt that this had actually helped, but he was reluctant to bring this up, as Patton seamed immensely pleased with himself. “It’s really quite hard to get those to work in here,” he had remarked, handing it back. The pen was running again, though rather too rapidly, and Plugg had difficulty making additions to the pipe-plan without turning it into a puddle of ink. He was amazed how much ink his cartridge seemed able to hold.  
Still, thought Plugg, at least the boy was more pleasant company than most people he had watching him work. Instead of the usual air of hurry, there was a sort of faint awe, coupled with undirected enthusiasm.  
  
Five hours later, after waging a brutal war against the pipes with a hacksaw and a foot-long spanner, Plugg had crumpled his plumbing plan in to a ball. It was not helping. He was developing an idea of how the pipes fit together, but mapping it in two dimensions was futile. He was better off keeping it in his head, where he was not forced to look at all the blatant impossibilities. He was now trying to estimate whether a small copper pipe (which Patton had been able to identify, who knew how, as the one leading to an old gardarobe shaft) was sufficiently wide to accommodate waste flow. The outside diameter of four inches might be cutting it rather tight, but since the inner diameter appeared to be in excess of a foot, Plugg thought he would use it. He was trying not to think very hard about it. A large part of him was tempted to rip out every pipe in the building, melt them down, and start over, but the inherent waste, plus the idea of ripping out the odd, scaly, pulsing one prevented him.  
  
A number of the school’s students had dropped by the room, between classes, and had stopped to observe him. They struck as fairly typical public-school children. The uniforms were, perhaps, slightly more ridiculous than average, but still did not compare with those of Eton. The students seemed to have been instructed not to disturb them, for they spoke only in hushed voices to one another, while Patton frowned at them, prominently displaying a silver badge with the word “Prefect,” etched on it. It had taken him some time to find it; he only produced it from his sporran after first pulling out two yo-yos, a saxophone mouth-piece, a rubber chicken, and half a dozen peppermints. However, at one point, when he had gone to fetch Plugg a mop, several younger students drew closer. Plugg, who was engaged in exploring with a plumber’s snake the inside of a pipe which appeared to bend sharply to the right several feet down, even though the outside of the pipe ran perfectly straight, was not entirely pleased with the disturbance.  
  
“What’s that?” said one, pointing at the tool in Plugg’s hand.  
  
“It’s a snake,” said Plugg, poking it savagely into the pipe, and frowning at another pipe above his head, from which the sound of his snake rapping against the metal seemed, in defiance of basic principles of topology, to be emanating.  
  
“Cor,” the child said. Then, smirking at the children around him, and winking, he went on “Lots of snakes in through there I bet. They like it dark and wet.(11) Ever seen a basilisk, Mister?”  
  
There was a certain amount of giggling, cut short when Patton returned, and restored order through the imposition of his authority as prefect. “Hey,” he said. “Sod off, the lot of you.”  
  
“What’s a basilisk?” Plugg asked, taking the mop from Patton, who had begun employing it with equal parts enthusiasm and incompetence.  
  
“What? Oh, don’t mind them, they were just trying to scare you. It’s a sort of a big poisonous snake that’s supposed to kill you if you meet its eyes. No one’s seen one in ages.”  
  
“Ah. Not important, then.”  
  
…  
  
After a week, and a lifetime’s worth of frustration, Plugg had come to his final sink of his final bathroom. He had deliberately left this sink until last in the hope that seeing the other pipes in the building might help him to understand what he saw here. It had not done so, and now he was attempting to remove the cover from a particularly ancient, enormous, and nonsensical pipe. The sinks in this lavatory had already had cold water supply and drainage, so all that had been necessary for Plugg to do was install a hot water supply, and set up the new sinks, configured for both hot and cold water. The old basin which had been over pipe, however, seamed to have had no drainage pipe at all, only a short length of lead which came up to the enormous pipe hidden behind the wall, and then stopped. The smaller pipe and the larger were both plugged, and did not connect to one another. The smaller pipe seemed to have been no more than a clumsy forgery of a working drainage system. The larger pipe (which was easily wide enough to accommodate Plugg himself) seemed to serve no purpose whatsoever. Both of these points annoyed Plugg. More than anything else, he detested shoddy workmanship. Unfortunately, he was prevented from further investigating the pipe by the extraordinarily stubborn cap. It was made of some glossy black material, and refused to budge from the mouth of the pipe, no matter how much force Plugg applied. Plugg had not even contemplated breaking the cap. Whatever material had been used in its construction had a distinctly unbreakable look. On the other hand, Plugg thought, the pipe itself was only lead…  
  
“Mr. Patton? I think if you look in my bag downstairs, you will see a box with a label that says ‘Danger Acetylene’…”  
  
…  
  
Plugg rappelled down the steeply slanting pipe, running a gloved hand along the inside of the pipe, checking for other pipes merging into the main shaft, in the dim light of his cigarette. He found none. He was increasingly of the opinion that this pipe was the most useless piece of plumbing he had ever seen. Still, it was entirely consistent with the rest of the castle’s pipes to have a sink drainage pipe large enough to accommodate a Shetland pony. (12)  
  
After several minutes of slow climbing, the pipe curved sharply, and Plugg scrambled out onto rough paving stones. He gave a sharp tug on the rope to indicate to Patton that he had landed, unclipped his carabiner, and pulled his torch from his pocket. It would not work. Plugg shook it, struck it sharply with his hand, and flipped the switch on and off rapidly. It still would not work. It had been behaving unreliably all week, and only repeated baton-twiddling on the part of Patton had been able to keep it at all functional.  
  
Still, Plugg was not about to climb all the way back up, just to have Patton perform some silly superstitious ritual to the gods of electricity. So, slinging his tool back over his shoulder, Plugg set off down the corridor, guiding himself by a gloved hand on the stone wall and the glow of a freshly lighted cigarette. Occasionally he would pause to strike a match for closer examination of some feature. Plugg’s knowledge of stone masonry was limited, but he suspected he would need to install some stays if he wanted to use this pipe for drainage. The stone was crumbling in some places, and looked as if a sharp shock would bring it down.  
  
He came, eventually, to a wider section of the tunnel. He continued following along one wall, until he bumped up against another wall running perpendicular to the first. A dead end? He struck a match, and a huge, ominous figure loomed above him.  
  
His reaction was automatic. The match fell from his hand, and he struck out with his right hand at the level of the figure’s jaw.  
  
Swearing is a lapsed art, with but a shadow of its past creativity. Muggle writer H. Rider Haggard describes a navy officer who (for reasons too convoluted and racist to discuss here) swears continuously, and without repetition, for ten minutes. That character was, though a navy man, an officer, a gentlemen, and thoroughly Victorian. Plugg was none of these things, and had lived through four and a half years of mud, cold, bad food, and being shot at. His swearing was masterly. In a loud ringing voice, like the bards of stories, he began to describe, in great detail, exactly what he thought about people who commissioned large statues to be built at the ends of dark sewage pipes, as well as their mothers and more distant relations. He passed, then, to cursing the statue itself, for being large, ugly, and pointless, and expressed a wish that it might turn to flesh, so that it could better be killed (in various unpleasant ways), as well as a contradictory wish that it should remain stone, but do a number of rather biological things to the aforementioned commissioner and extended family, as well as the sculptor and his ditto. After that, Plugg’s narration became rather unpleasant. Finally his roar faded to a whisper, as he nursed his injured knuckles.  
  
The acoustics of stone rooms can be strange. Plugg’s swearing continued echoing the dark room for some time after he had stopped speaking, curses overlapping one another in a mass of complicated sound that hurt Plugg’s ears. At first the sound was almost deafening, but slowly it faded, until it was no more than a soft, menacing hiss. (13)  
  
Plugg struck another match, and saw that, behind the statue, there was a narrow opening, into another chamber. He felt his way toward it, gingerly. He had spat out his cigarette in his bout of swearing, and he didn’t want to go through the trouble of fishing out his packet, opening it and lighting one, until his hand felt better. He did, however, fish a large spanner from his bag, which he weighed lightly in his left hand, to ease his nerves.  
  
It was well that he did make some effort to ease his nerves, for they were shortly to suffer from still more serious shock. As soon as he stood in the doorway, he was bowled over by some massive creature. He felt the gust before the creature hit him, and he lashed out with the wrench. The force of the creature’s lunge and of Plugg’s own blow knocked Plugg back and to the side, and his body caught up against the feet of the statue. The creature’s lunge carried it through the door-way and past Plugg into the dark room. There was a sharp pain in Plugg’s chest, and he felt liquid pouring from it.  
  
Plugg wrenched his broken pen from his pocket. The collision had snapped the metal casing, half of which had driven itself into his chest. The pen, into which Patton had put so much effort, would never write again, but its modifications were still noticeable. Instead of a dribble of ink one would expect from a broken pen, there was a fountain of it. Plugg tossed it away, in roughly the direction the creature had taken, and heard a sharp crack, and what felt like a bucket-full of ink caught him at chest height, with some splattering up into his face. This, from the loud splashing noises, was only a small portion of the ink now being released into the room. There was a furious hissing noise, and the sound of the writhing of the creature.  
  
Even as the ink struck him, Plugg had found his matchbook, and was striking one. In the wavering light, he saw a huge snake wheeling round. It moved with the unnatural, deceptive speed of all snakes, all the more astonishing because of its huge bulk. Its great head was coming around, blood from Plugg’s spanner-blow on its lower jaw, the upper part of the head and the lidless eyes covered in India ink.  
  
“It’s a sort of a big poisonous snake,” Patton had said “that’s supposed to kill you if you meet its eyes.” The clear screens that snakes have in place of eye-lids flicked down, to clear away the ink.  
  
Plugg, letting his match fall yet again, turned and dove to where he had dropped his bag when the snake had first struck, at the foot of the statue. The snake’s eyes were clear now, or else it had decided, in the fresh dark, to disregard sight. It was coming after him, with the same horrifying speed, its scales scraping softly against the stone. But Plugg had been using the same tool bag for thirty-five years, never changing the arrangement of the tools, never allowing a tool to be out of place for even an instant unless it was in use. By the time the snake had begun to move, his hand had already reached a sturdy glass bottle, and by the time it was half-way across the floor, he had smashed the top of the bottle off against the statue’s nose.  
  
The room beyond the door must have had a higher ceiling, so that the snake could raise its head for a quick strike. Plugg had been saved only because he had had to move the spanner a few feet when he heard the thing rushing toward him, while the snake had had to lunge half its body length. Here though, the ceiling was too low for the snake to gather itself together for such a strike. It would have to crawl straight up to him.  
  
For a half-second eternity Plugg waited, holding the bottle lightly in his hand, as the massive thing slithered toward him. His breathing and his heart were quicker, with the sudden exertion, but steady. He had spent his life, something in the back of his head told him, seeing things that could not exist, and forgetting them, and living on. He might, for all he knew, have faced this monster a dozen times before. Why should he be afraid?  
  
He did not move a muscle until he felt a wave of cold breath against him. Then, he flung the contents of the bottle full in the creature’s face.  
  
The bottle was the sort of thing that any plumber might carry with him, or at least any plumber used to clients who did not try obvious solutions themselves before calling him for help. Admittedly, it was rather stronger than strictly usual, since Plugg was in the habit of diluting it to a usable concentration on site, to save on weight in his bag. It was a solution of .75 molar solution of sodium hydroxide (KOH). A modern material data safety sheet would inform one that such a solution would be caustic, and extremely irritating to eyes or skin.  
  
Plugg would have put it rather differently: “Don’t let the stuff touch you, or it’ll burn like hell, and it’s the very devil to get off, and for God’s sake don’t get it in your eyes.”  
  
The creature jerked back, and Plugg felt the room shake as it struck the opposite wall. Lighting his last cigarette in the easy confidence that the basalisk’s death gaze would not pose a problem, and slinging his back over his shoulder, Plugg hurled himself past the snake, back up the corridor, pausing only to deliver half a dozen heavy spanner-blows to various parts of the creature. He sprinted back up the narrow hall, until it became clear the creature had no intention of following. He slowed then to a walk, for fear of injuring himself in the bad light of his cigarette.  
  
He clipped the carabineer at the end of the rope back onto his harness, and gave a sharp tug. Patton, who had been upstairs waiting patiently, began taking in slack. The rope moved with almost magical speed until Plugg neared the top of the pipe, when it paused for a moment, and then resumed with the much slower, more uneven motion of someone pulling up a heavy load by hand.  
  
Patton was panting by the time Plugg immerged, drenched in ink, mud, and a small amount of blood, still puffing at the end of his cigarette, with a thoughtful expression on his face. “Should be all right to run the sink drainage into there. Don’t know why they never did. Silly blighters. Didn’t get to the end, quite, but there’s already a ton of water running into it, and some other pipes going in, so it can’t hurt. Loads of room. Just one little problem I still need to look into. Here, you got a pen? Mine broke down there. I need to add a couple of things to my expenses list. Going to need a bit more gear.”  
  
Jenkins proudly produced a violent purple fountain pen (one of his prized possessions) and with it, Plugg wrote out a list. It read:  
  
Item: One bottle lye solution  
Item: New suit (old one soaked in ink)  
Item: Fountain pen  
Item: Indian pump.  
Item: Ten gallons India ink  
Item: Boss & Co. Double Barrel 12 gauge shotgun  
Item: Two boxes cartridges for same  
Item: ~~Three four~~ twelve more bottles lye solution (14)  
  
Plugg added estimated cost next to each item, and handed the list to Patton. “Would you go see Professor Jenkins, and ask him to approve these for me? And let him know I need to go into town to get some things. I’ll be back in a few days to put this last sink in order. Here,” he said, picking up the piece of pipe he had cut away “help me solder this back first, and put the sink back over. May as well have it look presentable, even if it don’t work.” The two replaced the piece of metal, and set the sink and the section of wood paneling they had removed back in front of the enormous pipe. After they had finished, Plugg knelt, and scratched something into the soft metal of the tap with his pocket knife. “Just so I remember which sink it is,” he said.  
  
…  
  
“Ah there you are Patton! I was hoping I would see you soon. Come in, come in. Have a seat. Tell me, how is our plumber doing.” Jenkins savored the unfamiliar word, pleased to be able to use it.  
  
“Nearly finished sir. Only one sink left. He sent me with this to put on his list of expenses. The first two he’s already used, and the rest are things he’ll need to set the sink right. He asked if he could be given a lift to the nearest town to get them”  
  
Jenkins took the list. He ignored the unfamiliar names of equipment, focusing only on the price, which he laboriously converted from pounds sterling to galleons. He whistled. “That’s a pretty substantial sum.”  
  
“I don’t think he’s trying to cheat us, sir. I don’t think he’d be the sort to put down things he didn’t need on an expense account.”  
  
“No, no, I daresay you are right. Still, it is a pretty big sum, just to get one sink working. Especially if he needs to go into town for it all. We’re miles away from a muggle town that might have all these… things. It hardly seems worth the trouble. Is everything else working?”  
  
“Yes sir. And I think the spells I’ve laid should keep ambient magic from knocking the system out. The stuff he’s putting in is pretty impressive, though. I suspect it would have worked even if I hadn’t done anything. He’s really thorough.” Patton spoke in a tone of faint awe.”  
  
“Ah, excellent,” Jenkins said. “He does seem to be very competent. Pity about the trouble with this last sink, of course. Tell me, where is it?”  
  
“On the second floor girl’s lavatory, sir.”  
  
“Oh, that! There’s no point bothering about that, it’s never worked. No point having him worrying about that. Competent he may be, but there is no way he’d get a sink working when caretakers haven’t been able to touch the thing with repairing spells for years. I’ll just give him his money, modify his memory, and send him on his way.”  
  
Patton bit his lip. It made sense. It really did. It was only one sink after all, and if no one had been able to get the drainage pipe working using magic. But then again, no one had been able to install a plumbing system nearly as good as what Plugg had put in using magic…  
  
“Perhaps we should ask the Headmaster, sir? I’m sure he wouldn’t mind spending a little extra money. After all, Plugg’s doing very good work and its really a reasonable price overall…”  
  
“No reason to spend money when you don’t have too, Patton. Anyway, the headmaster’s in Majorca. I understand you’ve enjoyed watching the fellow work, and I’m sure you’ve learned all sorts of interesting things, but really, we can’t have him here forever. It’s terribly disruptive. No, I’ll go send him on his way. We’re giving him a very nice bonus for promptness and good work.”  
  
Patton frowned slightly, but Professor Jenkins, rising from behind his desk and heading for the door, slapped him on the shoulder. “For heaven’’s sake, don’t look so worried, Patton. Its only one sink that doesn’t work. What harm could it possibly do?”  
  
  
…  
  
Afterward, and Some Notes on Sources  
  
Researching for this project posed a great many difficulties. Many stories of the exploits of Arthur Plugg are quite well-known, and some have even become popular nursery stories, but this one was uncovered only quite recently. Research was made especially difficult, owing to the shortage sources, since the only human witness of the most interesting parts of the story was Plugg, who had his memory wiped immediately thereafter. The story was only uncovered when a research team (including myself, Professor Cronk of Belgrade, and Dr. Scalorian of WIT, ably assisted by Hogwarts’ own resident Professor Minerva McGonagall) made a scan of the hallway leading to the so-called “Chamber of Secrets,” using globular phychometric scanners. The results of these scans gave us our first inkling that the chamber had been opened twice before the final string of basilisk attacks in 1992-93. We were able cross-check the data acquired in that study against that we extrapolated through close analysis of the priori incantatum effect of the memory charm used on Plugg, after we were able locate Jenkins’ wand in the Hogwarts archives. By running the combined data through a loose pensive screen, we constructed a fairly accurate, if somewhat sketchy, image of events. Interviews with Hogwarts students of the time helped to complete the picture. Those interested in further research may find our results in the Pensieve Archive in Glasgow.  
  
We were unable to gain any information from either Patton or Plugg directly. Patton, after his graduation, joined the ministry, and worked with the department of experimental charms until the Wars of Grindlewald, when he became Special Liason to the Office of the Muggle Prime Minister, for the sake of coordinating defense efforts. As one might deduce from the spell-work he performs in the course of the story, he was an extremely competent wizard. He is, by all accounts, still alive, though his current whereabouts are unknown.  
  
Plugg remains prominent on the historical record, appearing in the diary entries of a great many witches and wizards (including that of Nicholas Flammel, for whom he installed a particularly amazing plumbing system, complete with indoor fountain, ten foot Jacuzzi, and marble swimming pool), and in occasional Daily Prophet articles, until the time of the same wars. He was, at that time, unable to enlist owing to his advanced age, but remained important on the home front. There is some evidence that he may actually have joined the Secret Service, briefly, though this is difficult to substantiate. His last known location was in Sussex in 1951, at the funeral of his wife.  
  
Alfred Plugg was a remarkable individual. He remains, to this day, the only muggle since St. George to have single-handedly defeated a dragon; he survived a duel with an agent of Grindelwald; and he is one of a very short list of people, muggle or magical, to have seen a basilisk and lived. Such fame has, unfortunately, led to wild speculation, supported by a handful of coincidences. Sussex (as the Quibbler is fond of noting) suffered disproportionately few attacks by dark witches and wizards during either of the Great Wizarding wars. Attempts have been made to link this the fact that Plugg moved to Sussex from London, shortly after the time of this story. It is, however, inconceivable that Plugg could have even survived so long, since muggles lack the longevity of their magically capable brethren. It is important not to let stories which are interesting in their own right, such as the Ipswitch killings (15), or the Affair of the Hogsmead Gentleman (16), be lost to serious researches because of wild conspiracy theories.

 

* * *

 

Endnotes:  
  
(1) For any muggles in the readership, this is the wizarding equivalent of the OED, tracing the origin of every known word in every language (and several unknown ones), giving definitions, pronunciation, etymology, copious examples of usage, and predictions from no less than seven noted seers on likely future evolution of each word. It runs to 8,973 volumes. Also for any muggles in the readership, you needn’t worry, this is all a silly joke, which means absolutely nothing, and certainly does not indicate a secret magical society living all around you. Please do not be concerned. If you have any questions, the nice men and women with the robes and short sticks will be by shortly to make everything perfectly clear. “Muggles,” by the way, means people who are not members of the secret magical society all around you which certainly doesn’t exist. Treasure that (hopefully short-lived) knowledge.  
  
(2) The best general biography of Tesla remains: A. Dumbledore, And You Thought I Was a Bit Weird (London: Scholastic, 1982).  
  
(3) Please don’t think about the Flapper party. It will make your brain hurt.  
  
(4) Except possibly Whiffles Academy, in Tazmania, but no one has ever been able to prove it really exists. Since the only evidence is a tendency for beer left unattended anywhere nearby to vanish mysteriously, with the bottles turning up later, empty, near Frenchman’s Bay, it probably doesn’t count.  
  
(5) Witchering world? Warlokian world? Magimundus? There seems to be not any established convention for expressing this in a gender-neutral way. In a sane world, I could solve this problem by consulting a decent style guide. Unfortunately, the only two extent style guides within the w___ing world are the house guides of The Daily Prophet and Quibbler Magazine. No one appears to have ever read the former before, including its editor, which is a pity, since the author appears to have been something of a wit, who rendered the guide into a deft if heavy-handed satire of that paper’s characteristic style: Style Guide of the Daily Profit (sic.) (London: Prophet Publications, 1999). Its section on sexist language is somewhat amusing, but in no way helpful. The Quibbler’s style guide, I am informed, is written “on the wings of all the butterflies in Bolivia” (Luna Lovegood, Personal Correspondence, July 2015). When, in desperation, I consulted the authors and editors of several muggle publications, I had a great deal of trouble getting them to take me seriously, or even meet with me about this issue. After my unsuccessful attempt to arrange a meeting with Kate Turubian by breaking into her house in the middle of the night (admittedly an error in judgement), I abandoned the attempt. A better non-muggle style guide remains an urgent desideratum, as indeed is a healing spell better adapted for buckshot wounds.  
  
(6) This is a bad idea, by the way, given the finicky nature of vanishing cupboard magic. A really, really bad idea.  
  
(7) Maybe. You know what else the w___ing world doesn’t have? Any published inflation or currency conversion indices. One sometimes wonders if our society made some kind of tactical error in not training literally anyone in economics or mathematics at a secondary or post-secondary level. Technically, the Gringotts goblins probably have such indices, but goblin intellectual property lawsuits make advanced currency exchange economics look like tiddley-winks.  
  
(8) There ought to be a citation here, but I can’t be buggered. What’s the point, when no one reads them, anyway? As long as one peppers the work with occasional foot-notes, everyone assumes you did your research.  
  
(9) Ibid.  
  
(10) Exactly why Plugg thought that members of the Society of Jesus would be inclined to wear bright orange robes is a question of some interest to several graduate students of mine, who have spent several months researching the question, on account of them not having lives. Possibly Plugg mixed up Catholics and Buddhists.  
  
(11) I have been unable to ascertain the identity of this child, but if anyone is interested in doing further research, I have a list of students present at Hogwarts at the time who flunked Care of Magical Creatures, which would make an excellent starting place.  
  
(12) Although, of course, most Shetland ponies rappel badly.  
  
(13) In the days of Salazar Slytherin, password spells had not yet been perfected. It was possible to create semi-sentient magical objects that could actually understand and interpret speech, but it was much more usual to simply create a spell to recognize general sound patterns. These functioned fairly well, but could sometimes be overwhelmed by a sheer mass of sound, if some portion of it happened to resemble the keyword closely enough.  
  
(14) The document is still present in the Hogwarts archives, although God help you if you want to get it from Madam Pince. I had to set up a shrieking charm at the opposite end of the library, put up a disillusionment charm at full sprint, and hide in the reference section for an hour and a half just the see the blasted thing. Some absolute bastard decided to make over half the bookshelves in the Hogwarts Special Collections un-plottable, so I can’t give you a shelf mark. You will have to take my word for it.  
  
(15) Readers may recall this somewhat unusual incident, when, midway through the first Great Wizarding War, two of Voldemort’s supporters were found dead in Ipswitch, one from repeated wounds caused by a muggle firearm, the other from blunt trauma. The killer was never identified.  
  
(16) Again, to assist the reader’s memory: In the spring of 1993, an old man entered Hogsmead, armed with a fire-arm of some sort, and carrying a large carpet-bag. Locals, realizing he was not a wizard, questioned him as to why he was there, but he was unable to respond, except by saying that he “thought he ought to be there.” Seeing the general air of celebration (owing to reports of the death of the Hogwarts basilisk) he seemed to be greatly cheered, and departed, before ministry officials could arrive. He is, to date, the only muggle known to have passed through Hogsmead’s anti-muggle defenses without magical assistance.


End file.
